AlienWare (so Dell) has just unveiled a gaming PC running Ubuntu and Steam, designed to be hooked up to a TV - essentially a Steambox. "With over 25 gaming titles available and more being added, users can access Steam For Linux to play online games, including your favorite titles like Team Fortress 2 and Serious Sam 3." Everything starts out small, but with Valve going full throttle with this, expect this library to grow.

FFS. I admit that it could be a problem if you install every shite piece of software under the sun.

No it isn't in my opinion, we could argue backwards and forwards all day. I have not heard anyone until this conversation ever complain on forums, work (I work in Micrsoft shops for most of my career) and personally that have ever had that problem.

It is rare.

In my opinion and for me personally Linux / Ubuntu is better than Windows as a desktop os and has been for a long time.

And I disagree strongly with it, as a desktop Linux user since around 2003.

For the following reasons:

* Unless you have very standard set of hardware a lot of the times you are down to the command line to bring things like WiFi online.

* Constant churn in the big DEs, Gnome has pretty much started again and KDE threw everything all away to start with KDE4. Then you have unity that is tied to ubuntu.

It isn't as bad as it was, but to get anything done reliably you need to drop down the CLI. The update tool in Fedora doesn't work well for whatever reason with my laptop.

There never a distro that doesn't have niggly little problems. I won't go on about having to install Things like Steam and Spotify on Linux being ridiculously difficult because lib versions change quite often.

Regarding Linux DEs, I'd recommend Xfce to everyone who is tired of the KDE and Gnome bullshit. Here's why:

-As far as I can tell, the dev team has never broken everything just to scratch an itch. Versions are made of cautious, iterative improvements, that seem to be based on actual user feedback.

-It's remarkably snappy, but with a fairly complete feature set like other lightweight DEs.

-It's very stable, new features can be a bit of a hit and miss but they tend to stabilize after a few minor releases (though things you've come to expect on other DEs, like automount or files on the desktop, can be new here. It's the main drawback of their cautious approach to development as far as I can tell)

-It works well in its default setup, and can be tweaked pretty deeply.

-While receiving less love than KDE and Gnome from distros, it's still pretty well integrated in Ubuntu and Mint. Actually, for some reason, Xfce-based spins tend to be less crashy than others in areas which shouldn't be related, such as audio and composited graphics.

One of the reasons why I got into the Linux universe is that I was tired of Windows and OS X releases trying to reinvent the world, following some weird vision that I don't feel part of, and breaking my software and workflows as a result. It seems to me that in the Linux world, a combination of the right distro and the right DE can be used to avoid that, and so far Mint 13 Xfce has done it for me.